Review of George L. Mosse's "Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This book, one of the best and most insightful I have read in a long time, rests at a cross-section between art, culture, sociology, and memory. At 225 pages, it is both extremely short, and yet scholarly, well-argued, timely, and convincing.

Does the sudden emergence of trench warfare in any way transmute the ways in which we walk about and experience war? Did the shift from monarchy to burgeoning nation-states during this time period change soldierly ideological motivations in wanting to engage in warfare? Why did separate cemeteries appear for soldiers, completely unheard of before the nineteenth century, suddenly start appearing in France and Germany? These questions form a group of concerns the book discusses, yet Mosse manages to touch on a number of other topics, as well.

About 600,000 soldiers died during the American Civil War, while just two generations later in World War I, almost 9 million perished. Mosse argues that facts like this, along with the horrors of trench warfare, gave rise to a construction of civic religion centered around remembrance and a search for human meaning as a way to cope with heretofore unknown amounts of barbarism. This remembrance, along with the various ways of glorifying and sanctifying battle that would arise, Mosse refers collectively to as the “Myth of the War Experience.” 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the constitution of many armies gradually shifted from conscripted poverty-ridden peasants to bourgeois, well-educated professional soldiers, who envisioned themselves fighting for Aufbruch (a nascent national-democratic spirit). Suddenly, going off to war was no cause for angst and concern, but rather a chance to fight for the fatherland, and an opportunity to get to see new and exotic places (see the work of soldier-poets like Lord Byron and Theodor Korner). Aesthetic representations of triumph were built from both classical pagan imagery and Protestant piety, which were used to create “communities of the dead” (military cemeteries) where soldiers could rest pure, away from mere civilians. 

Mosse claims that culture and art, too, have a definite place in shaping the ideology of the Myth of the War Experience. The Italian Futurists (like Marinetti) and German Expressionists added to the Myth Experience a sense of camaraderie to war in which a “new man” would be created, forming a society free of hypocrisy and tyranny (highly ironic, as Marinetti is perhaps best remembered for his flirtations with fascism). Youth now symbolized manhood, virility, and pure energy. Death was no long an unfortunate loss, but a sacrifice and a chance for eternal resurrection (again, that Christian imagery) for a glorious cause.

A retroactive Romanticism was also invoked, full of its images of bucolic hills and untainted, rural countryside, and used to symbolize purity away from an ill, noxious city (the literature of the nineteenth century is replete with metaphors of the city as rotten and diseased). Movies touting the moral virtues of mountain climbing as a “manly” conquering of nature filled the screens, effectively masking the dangers of death and destruction while at the same time shoring up ideas that were attractive to far right political elements, like adventure, domination, and conquest.

The Myth’s appearance in popular culture was perhaps inevitable, but had a most interesting result: the “process of trivialization.” There are several photos in the book depicting the war as a humorous, quaint, distant affair. There is a German postcard of a rabbit laying eggs with the caption “Frohliche Ostern” (Happy Easter), one from Au Bon Marche showing two little girls stomping all over a helpless German toy soldier, and perhaps most disturbingly, a father cradling his baby boy and looking aside admiring another of his boys with the caption “The New Conscripts.” Some artists, including the German Rudolf Grossmanns, made a career producing nothing but kitsch showing heroic boys yearning for the joys of the battlefield. Closely related to trivialization is the brutalization of political discourse in which themes and tropes of militarism and aggression gave additional emphasis to notions of manliness, a trend which continued until World War II.

But around this time, these ideological means started to outgrow their political and historical usefulness. After German defeat in the First World War, it could be effectively argued that the courageous Germans had not actually lost the war, they just hadn’t yet won. But after losing another World War, the Myth was too tendentious and suspicious to garner populist support for the political right. Thus the fiery rhetoric of manliness and sacrifice in the name of one’s country saw its last days.

For anyone convinced that “ideology” is just a word used in the ivory towers of academia, or that popular culture doesn’t drastically affect the way we perceive and experience some of the most fundamental aspects of our world, this book will forever change your mind. It is most highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of war memorials, changing perceptions of war and the soldier, and the politics of the interwar years.

Review of Robert Darnton's "The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Most history of the early modern period written more than a generation ago was what Robert Darnton identifies as “top-down” history: it is the history of royalty, nobles, and the intellectual elites whose ideas largely defined the times. But this contribution, along with Natalie Zemon Davis’ “The Return of Martin Guerre” and Carlo Ginzburg’s “The Cheese and the Worms,” is essential in introducing a more egalitarian, social, “bottom-up” history that emphasizes regular people. The book contains five chapters loosely interwoven around an attempt to carve out this special niche in historiography.

The opening chapter, “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose” gives a close historical reading to many of the fairy tales that we remember reading with innocent delight as children. Darnton scours the interpretations of Bettelheim and Fromm, dismissing them for not paying enough attention to the historical circumstances of their construction and their telling. Little did they even realize that their readings, based on the Grimm’s compilation instead of Perrault’s, were bowdlerized of most of the blood, violence, and scatological humor that existed in the originals, probably because of the reading demands of a growing European moralistic bourgeois. Why are some of these seventeenth and eighteenth-century fairy tales so gory? His answer is, quite simply, that our shock is just a function of how much times have changed. These were times in which children (this is before the birth of childhood as we know it) were subjected to backbreaking dawn-to-dusk labor (reminiscent of Rumpelstiltskin); in which peasants, unable to feed another child, were forced to abandon newborns (Hansel and Gretel); and, in a peculiar demography in which one of every five Norman men re-wed after the death of his first wife, stories of stepmothers abounded (Cinderella). Once familiar with these details, the innocence we thought we knew is quickly upset. These stories were the work of imagination and whim, but Darnton does a superb job of detailing the degree to which they were very social products of social history as it was happening “on the ground.” 

The eponymous chapter details many aspects of the growing print culture in the Ancien Regime. Master printmakers would hire journeymen to come into their shop and learn their craft. But one day in a Paris shop, these journeymen slaughtered hundreds of cats, much to their amusement, and repeated the episode in mock trials no less than a dozen different times over the next few months. As in the chapter on fairy tales, why we no longer see this as humorous, and indeed see it as barbaric, tells us just how much, as Darnton says, the “ontological position” of the cat has changed. The journeymen were upset that younger, much less experienced workers were being brought in to perform their work for almost nothing while the masters would retire to their personal rooms and lounge, eat, sleep, and take care of their cats. In a sort of Rabelasian logic of social carnival, the journeymen saw the murder of the cats as retribution meted out for the wrongs perpetrated against them. 

The book has three other chapters: one on a police inspector who keeps a personal file on French intellectuals, ensuring that their thinking never becomes too freewheeling, another with one man’s, and largely one culture’s, growing obsession with the work of Rousseau (why was “La Nouvelle Heloise” such a big seller, anyway?), and the somewhat less interesting “A Bourgeois Puts His World In Order: The City As Text.” Each of these renders very important and insightful ideas for those readers who are as interested in the caprices of history-telling and historiography as they are the events of history themselves.